A red squirrel or Eichhörnchen (the little horned one of the oak), as it’s known in Germany.
Photograph: Blickwinkel/Alamy

Among the whaleback forested hills of north Germany, where my father grew up and where hikers may walk for hours at a time without coming out from under the cover of trees, there are words that speak to Britain of gain and loss.

On an early-morning rise into the forest fringe, I began to check and recite the names that scarcely need translation – beech, birch, hazel, oak: Buche, Birke, Hasel, Eiche. The Saxon settlers who crossed the Channel to colonise Britain more than 1,500 years ago found leafy familiars in their new country and attached labels from their own language that have stuck to this day. Even their word for tree – Baum – survives in “beam”.

One species of tree scattered on the slopes here had not made it across the water when the Anglo-Saxons named the trees in their new homeland. It is what Germans had called, with adjectival correctness, the mountain maple. When it was introduced to Britain, around 500 years ago, our ancestors mistakenly dubbed it “sycomore”, thinking that it was a Middle Eastern species of fig.

When I last walked here in spring, the whole forest floor was a wash of white stars. Legend has it that slumbering bears woke famished from hibernation and gorged themselves on the pungent leaves of the first plant to flush green in the forest. The Germans call this flower Bärlauch – bear’s garlic. An appellation that is steeped in romance and dates the plant’s emergence so memorably has sunk into the sediment of obscurity for us. Yet our pre-eminent title “ramsons” is itself of Saxon origin, as the placenames Ramsey and Ramsbottom testify.

I sheared off the flat track that skirted the forest edge to climb a snaking sliver of a deer path. A sharp scuff of leaves gave me just enough time to look up into a rufous elfin face with pointy ears peeping out from behind a trunk, before it vanished. German captures both the habitat and the characteristic glimpses humans snatch of the animal they call Eichhörnchen, the “little horned one of the oak”. In medieval times, we plumped for Norman French “squirrel”. It’s quirky, but did it perhaps supplant richer, more evocative names of Saxon origin?

•Derek Niemann’s Tweet of the Day on Sunday 11 November (BBC Radio 4, 8.58am) features the grey partridge, a bird that thrived in the no man’s land of the first world war.